


because we won't let go

by oonaseckar



Category: The Time Traveller's Wife (2009), Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, M/M, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22465786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Lucy is haunted, in the new house.  She can't quite put her finger on it, but there's definitely a presence here.  Or there was.  Or there will be.
Relationships: Garcia Flynn/Wyatt Logan, Rufus Carlin/Jiya, Wyatt Logan/Lucy Preston
Kudos: 3





	1. the ghosts of long-dead cookies

**Author's Note:**

> Work title from Sue Grafton, M Is For Malice.   
> Chapter title is Neil Gaiman.

Lucy lies in the dark, dreading the ghost under the bed. She knows it's there, she can feel its presence, even though it's never said a word, appeared, made a move. This is the family's new house, and they only moved in two weeks ago. She hasn't yet told her dad and step-mom that the place is haunted: she doesn't think that it's liable to go down well.

Their old house was modern and clean and light and well-heated, even though it was in an area with a lot of traffic and no good public schools close by, and Ma – her step-mom, because her biological mum was Mum, of course – well, Ma had liked it, and so had Lucy, and neither had really wanted to leave. But Dad had said he was tired of school shootings and savages he didn't approve of in the White House, and his company wanted him to move to England anyhow, and wasn't Lucy half-English anyway? Wouldn't it be fun? And the upshot of it was that six months after he stopped just grumbling and watching house buying programs on TV, and started looking at Brit realtor websites in earnest, here they were. Living in a country village like something outta Miss Marple, with a snooty private girls' school up the road she was registered for when 'term' began again, and living in an old vicarage with a mossy tumbledown garden and a stream running by the side and more drafts and mice and thick leaded windows than you could shake a retired detective story general's walking stick at.

Lucy knows it's too early to make any kind of an informed decision. But she's pretty sure that she hates it anyway. And not just because of the drafts and the mice.

“I've got a funny feeling about this place,” she'd said tentatively, first day in, and drinking coffee in the huge Aga-infested kitchen with Ma. It was the truth, too. Even stepping off the hearth mat and taking her first step over the threshold, hours before, there'd been a... chill.

There was a chill everywhere you went, even places that it wasn't drafty. And Lucy had a feeling all the time that she'd just missed someone saying something. It was as if she became suddenly aware that she hadn't been paying attention, and someone was waiting for her to get with the program and pick up the loose thread of the conversation, to resume their chatting. Which sounded cosy, but didn't feel it.

What did you say? She wanted to ask, suddenly coming to herself in an empty room and wondering why she'd walked in there. It was like a bell ringing in the silence, but a bell that she couldn't hear, only feel.

Anyway. She's brought it up since, and neither Ma nor Dad want to hear about it. Dad loves the house – or he claims to, because admitting that the purchase is clearly a mistake and is going to be massively expensive to put right, what with mice and the plumbing and the boiler, would entail a loss of face that he isn't of the personality type to find acceptable. Ma doesn't mind it: doesn't hate it enough to back Lucy up and complain about it, anyway, to rebel against Dad having laid down the law by absolute power of fiat and veto.

Now it's got to the point where she's afraid to go to bed, and can't sleep right when she does, and jerks awake suddenly in the early hours of the morning. When she wakes, these past few days, she feels urgently that she can't get a breath, and as if someone has been watching her. Rather as if they've been watching her while sitting on her chest, in fact.

And she still hasn't actually seen or heard a damn thing. She can't tell Ma or Dad about this. They'd just think that she'd gone nutso. Or maybe telling them is exactly what she needs to do. Maybe she is losing her marbles, just in time for a new school year, in a new school, with all her old friends left far behind. Wonderful, what a gift.


	2. the past is never dead.  it's not even past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carol knows there's something wrong, too.
> 
> (Clue: it's her husband.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is William Faulkner.

So she just lies and trembles in the dark, waiting for sunrise and waiting for daylight. She needs to pee but she can't bring herself to move, to get up. Right now she'd sooner let her bladder burst than confront what's waiting for her. She knows it's waiting. She just doesn't know what _it_ is, that's all. She prays for morning.

_**CAROL** _

Carol keeps waking early in the morning, and she isn't sure why. She's had a couple of weeks to get used to the new house by now, and she _is_ used to it. It's neither the blissful idyll that Benjamin persists in acclaiming it as, nor the horror hell-pit that Lucy keeps mumbling about, in her vaguely threatening, adolescently non-specific way. Maybe it's concern for Lucy that's preventing her from getting a good night's sleep. She's fifteen year's old, for Christ's sake. She shouldn't look that way when she shows her face in the kitchen in the morning. Haggard, like she's not slept a wink any more than her stepmother, but worse still. Her big dark eyes are persistently haunted, day after day, and they're so black-shadowed she looks like a lemur with bad dreams.

Nothing wrong, though, of course. Like any kid that age, any enquiry after her health, how she's doing, what the hell's going on to put those hollows in her cheeks and the ghosts in her eyes... Well, Carol's tired od having her head bitten off, and there's an end to it. She's not asking again. She loves the little basket-case, is more of a mother to her than that bitch who birthed her and then licked herself like she'd just divested herself of a whole litterful of runts and couldn't run off fast enough. Appropriate for such a bloody bitch. But there is a limit, and shes about reached it.

But she is awake again herself, and she's thoroughly tired of it. She lies and listens to Ben snore a good five minutes, then she pats his back and gets up, pads softly downstairs. Maybe a cup of coffee will help, or pass the time at least.

The lounge light is on, though. Not the main light, but the side-table light with the dimmer switch. Carol's pretty sure she didn't leave it on before she was the last up to bed – hell, she knows it, like anyone else with a respectable level of obsessive compulsive disorder. The TV screen's playing quietly too.


	3. how did it get so late so soon?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy's not an easy kid to deal with. Carol's getting worried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Dr Seuss.

When she pushes the door further open, softly, and pokes her head in, Lucy's curled up in a corner of the couch, with the couch throw pulled tight around her. Her face is wrong. It's all wrong. Someone who creeps downstairs because they can't sleep, and curls upon the couch, and has the TV on for white noise at least and a kind of company... They should still be tired enough to look relaxed, to be slumped and willing for dreams and sleep to take 'em off to a more restful place.

It's still night-time, even in the pits of insomnia. But Carol's step-daughter turns her face to the intruder in the living-room, and she looks, well, not rested. More like a skull, eyes shadowed more blackly than they are lately even in the daytime, face too thin, mouth fallen open. A frightened skull: clutching at the edges of the throw to hold it tightly about her, and even as she turns to look at Carol, her gaze begins to flit about again, from one corner of the room to another to yet another. As if she's expecting assault on the castle walls from all sides. As if monsters might dive-bomb from the curtain epaulettes, as if a home invasion might launch itself from any side.

It's the small hours of the night, and Lucy's sitting in a state of total fear and dread downstairs in this creaky, creepy old house, having some kind of a breakdown.

Carol hasn't had a good year so far. Near marital-breakdown, followed by a move she wouldn't have chosen taken for the sake of Rittenhouse PLC, John's stupid near-religion. And her own job's getting to be stressful, what with all the kids in the British equivalent of eight grade being mouthy little assholes. But, right now, there's only one priority.


	4. radioactive cockroaches and your mum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy is the child of Carol's heart. The maddening, troublesome, troubled child of her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Neil Gaiman.

“Honey. What's up with you? What are you doing down here, can you not sleep again?” She cozies up to Lucy's side, and strokes a cautious hand through the poor girl's fine dark hair. Let's just pray it isn't a real break-down, she mentally notes. There's no way John would deal well with that. It would be about the last straw in the indignities and inconveniences his family have so far heaped upon him... The poor suffering martyr -- lately inflicting his imagined wrongs on the rest of them, with interest.

Well, all right, so he's not quite as bad as that. Lucy's bio-mother Annie running off in the first place wasn't any of his fault –- as Carol remembers, he was quite a nice fella back then. Back when she was Annie's buddy, and incredulously appalled at her buddy's gradual, not-so-gradual devolution from naughty girl to frankly unfaithful wife and slatternly housewife. (No, she didn't go out to work. Still doesn't, as far as Carol knows, though she doesn't make any kind of a point of keeping in touch.)


End file.
